 Thanks for checking this video out. Your mountaintop news video is coming up in just a minute. Did you know that it's going to be watched thousands of times, shared a bunch of times, likes, comments, you name it, it's going to be there? Why is it your ad here? Call me. Wednesday Congressman Hal Rogers visited the U.S. 23 Country Music Highway Museum to speak with Johnson County and Paintsville first responders and to announce $860,000 in funds for new communication equipment. This is a chance for Johnson County Paintsville first responders to have new radio equipment, digital, which is modern. It will help communicate between the two or three or four units that are fighting a fire or flooding or what have you. This allows them to communicate quickly. It will save lives, save property, and it will save the first responders. With the gear, digital equipment will replace an aging analog infrastructure often impacted by our region's mountains. Paintsville Johnson County Emergency Management Director Gary McClure says the new equipment will make a tremendous difference. To begin with, we're at a disadvantage because we live in the mountains. I mentioned repeaters. Basically, if you've got a handheld radio and if you're four or five miles out of the city away from a repeater, it's hard to take a handheld radio and trigger that 100-watt repeater. So the digital system works a lot better in the mountainous region that we live in. And it just should make a tremendous amount of difference because naturally, and of course we've already, we've got five repeaters in the county now, but it's possible we'll need four or five more to cover, to be able to cover the whole county. As from the announcement, we'll go towards installing additional repeaters and providing law enforcement, EMS, and fire departments with digital gear. For Mountain Top News, I'm Joel Korjol.